Beautiful timetables

November 11, 2007

Because I wanted a clear and compact way to display the timetable of the tram nearby, I created a small project. My goal was to have something more ‘visual’ than a list with numbers. I am interested in new ways to display information and what’s nice about it and why.

I think the result is something that has a bit of a learning curve and is therefore less suitable for ‘one-time’ usage. On the other hand, because it’s more of a picture and not a bunch of numbers I think it’s much easier to learn the timetable by heart for regular users.

For specification I wanted a small and simple language and preferably not start with writing a parser, so I decided to hitch a ride with Haskell first.

I’d love to hear your opinion, both a first reaction and after experimenting with it.

The code doesn’t do much, actually. I forgot to tell something about the ‘features’ in the post but some thing it does:

* Minimize the width of timetable by splitting at the biggest ‘gap’ (and not at midnight).
* Calculate all sets of days, sorting them on the number of days.
* The colors of the sets go from dark to light. So, the darker the dot, the more days it accounts for.

@Ben: the reason the dots are gray is mainly that it should be printable on my laser printer ;)